Project Coordinator Ed Cormier, of the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard, watches local eighth-graders manipulate their “Sea Perches” through a series of courses in the Sanford-Springvale YMCA’s swimming pool on Friday.
courtesy photo by Kiana MacKenna (Estes)

SANFORD — The Portsmouth Naval Shipyard and the Sanford School Department recently joined forces to help local eighth-graders build submersible “sea perches” into order to learn more about science, technology, engineering and math — or STEM, as the combined subjects are called for short.

Project Coordinator Ed Cormier, of the shipyard, guided and encouraged the students, who built the sea perches with PVC piping, netting and flotation materials and later fitted them with motors.

The students took one week to build their perches before trying them out by submersing them in the pool at the Sanford-Springvale YMCA last Friday.

The students visited three stations arranged around the pool.

One station focused on recovery, in that students had to move their remote-controlled perches along the bottom of the pool to retrieve such “sunken treasures” as rings and PVC couplers.

The second station had three weighted hula hoops in the pool that made up a course called “Salvage Dive.” The students had to navigate their submersibles through the hoops and then retrace their steps in reverse. The course was intended to give them an idea of what it feels like to conduct a deep-sea search through the sunken Titanic.

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courtesy photo by Kiana MacKenna (Estes)
A “sea perch,” built by local eighth-graders, navigates the chlorinated waters of the Sanford-Springvale YMCA’s swimming pool on Friday morning.

The final station — the hardest of the three — was called “Cap the Well.” Students added mechanical arms to their perches and had to try to manipulate them in the water to pick up a PVC cap with an attached zip tie and put it on a pipe flange to simulate capping a well. To make things fun, the students imagined that they were representing the “Yankee Marine Crude Oil Association (YMCA).”

In addition to Cormier, crew members of the USS Miami donated their time to help the students on Friday. Sanford is the host city for the crew of the Miami, which is currently docked at the shipyard.“They provided encouragement when the kids were getting frustrated and helped them troubleshoot any problems that arose,” Cormier said of the submarine’s crew. “Additionally, they were able to put a face and a name to the heroes they see on the news and add some tangible meaning to the Pledge of Allegiance that they say every morning.”This is the second year in a row that Cormier and the Miami crew led and assisted local eighth-graders with such a project.

Cormier said the students showed enthusiasm for their project both at the pool and in their class.“Seeing these teens put there phones and mp3 players down and get engaged in the project was amazing,” he said.Cormier added that the students were taken with the Miami crew too.

“Every morning when I arrived, the first thing the students wanted to know was if the sailors would be back again today,” he said.